So, What IS Energy Anyway?
Summary: As you know, energy is what makes life possible. It enables the chemical reactions in your body and makes the stars shine. It holds things together and tears them apart. Without it, nothing would happen. Heck, nothing much would exist . It is what makes a rock roll down a hill, makes a balloon full of hydrogen rise, allows humans to change rocks into skyscrapers and dirt into candy bars. You can tell when you have a little or a lot of it and would starve without it. So, what IS it?
We don’t know.
That may well seem to you to be a poor answer from your learned authors, but we’re doing a synthesis of science here, so it’s probably worth mentioning what we don’t know exactly, except that it is the ability to do work - not just “we”, your authors, but “we” the human species. We know what it can and can’t do, how it manifests and flows through systems, but - in all honesty - not what it IS. Generally, energy is described in circular terms, by what it can do rather than what it is, as if one defined “money” as the ability to acquire candy without repercussions (which is how we all defined it at age 4). In this way we are defining a basic attribute of reality by what it can do versus what it might be. One could just as well use the term “magic” as “energy.”
Here is a definition of energy you likely won’t find anywhere else: We don’t know what energy is, other than it exists and accounts for what we see around us .
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